Untitled Sermon (2)
Boots on the Ground
Wilfred Owen, a poet of the World War I period, described in the lines below his attitude after seeing a friend gag in a green field of gas fumes during an enemy gas attack. Owen himself was killed in action a week before the armistice but left a legacy of poems that decried the futility and horror of war.
…
If in some smothered dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face.
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest,
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.*
[*“Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country,” Horace]1451
Poverty, Cycle of
John Perkins, black evangelist and social worker in Jackson, Mississippi, related a story concerning a black woman who was trapped in poverty. She had ten or twelve kids packed into a four-room house.
All her cupboard held was cornbread. When Perkins encouraged the small Oak Ridge Church outside of Mendenhall, Mississippi, to help this neighbor out, they began to send food. But it didn’t produce much change. The church asked itself, “How could Christ’s love deal with these needs?”
The answer began to surface when Perkins observed that in the summer, while it was hot and humid, the woman and her children tore wood off the outside of the house to use in their cooking fire. You could look right through the whole house. It seemed stupid to tear up the house when winter was just a few months away, so many of the people in the community quit trying to be charitable. They began to blame the woman for her own problems. To a certain extent, she was to blame, but Perkins recognized that she was trapped in the cycle of poverty.
The root problem was that for this woman and many folks like her, poverty had moved beyond her physical condition to claim her whole mind. To the poor, poverty leads to thinking just for the moment. It leads to an inability to think about the future because of the total demand to think about survival in the present. It is a culture, a whole way of life. Money can’t help until there is reason to have hope for the future.995
Witness, by Life
Some years ago, on returning from a business trip, a man brought his wife some souvenirs. Among them was a matchbox that would glow in the dark. After giving it to her, he turned out the light, but the object was not visible. “This must be a joke!” she said. Disappointed, the husband commented, “I’ve been cheated!” Then his wife noticed some French words on the box. Taking it to a friend who knew the language, she was told that the directions read: “If you want me to shine at night, keep me in the sunlight all day.” So she put her gift in a south window. That evening when she turned out the light, the matchbox had a brilliant glow. The surprised husband asked, “What did you do?” “Oh, I found the secret,” she said. “Before it can shine in the dark, it must be exposed to the light.”
Just as the matchbox, having been exposed to the sun, took on the nature of the sun and began to shine, so Christians should constantly expose themselves to the Son, that they may take on his nature and shine as lights in a dark world.1468
